Crossing Models of Media's Future

Plus--as mistakenly advertised yesterday--a guide to Journal submissions

Since my career began, I’ve wondered about the future of content and tried to get closer to the frontier. Would the comics I made be best served under a syndication model, a subscription model, or a social model? Would it be better to build an app or push more of a presence on the major social networks?

I’m more of an experimenter than a strategist. I believe in trying things for their own sake and finding out for ourselves how they work or don’t. That approach has led me down some blind alleys, but it’s also led me to some rich opportunities.

One experiment with the crossword market that I’m paying closer attention to is Crosswordr. The “-r” is a bit nostalgic. After the photo-sharing site Flickr came to prominence, a number of other sites followed its general sharing model and named themselves with an ending “r” that stood in for “er.” It’s a bit like the convention of naming every online guessing game something that ends in “-le,” after Wordle.

The creators of the site intend for it to be a crossword-sharing hub, and they’ve recruited some top-tier talent to populate it, including Black Crossword, Brendan Emmett Quigley, and Brian Callahan…and that’s just the B’s.

Unlike the somewhat similar Crosshare, Crosswordr is doing a little more vetting of its contributors, at least for now. (There’s not too much of a spam-account problem in the puzzling community, but perhaps better safe than sorry.) Constructors are invited to submit applications to contact@crossplaydigital.com to get full accounts.

I’ll be sending in such an application, and we’ll see how it goes. I started my creative career learning by doing on the internet, and I suspect I’ll keep doing that as long as I have fingers to type with.

This Monday is the deadline for submissions to the latest issue of The Journal of Wordplay. I’ve had a few questions about what makes a good Journal submission, so I thought I’d clarify that in this space.

Note: if you’ve submitted something and I haven’t already talked to you about this, then you’re fine. This pertains to only a couple of queries I’ve gotten so far, but it’s a rule I want to set going forward.

My concept of what constitutes wordplay is a broad one. Almost any material that uses specific types like anagrams, spoonerisms, palindromes, and letterbanks might be of interest. But many types of wordplay aren’t so narrowly specific. Puns, puzzles, and writing-style exercises also fall within our purview.

However, I’m not interested in publishing just a crossword, unaccompanied by any analysis. (Otherwise, I might put some of my own in there!) To be blunt, it’s not hard to find other periodical markets for crosswords—I just mentioned one earlier in this very post.

The same goes for simple puns, or writing-style exercises with no commentary to explain the constraints being used. There are plenty of other periodical markets for those, too.

If a style exercise is very obvious in its use of wordplay, that might be a different situation! Likewise, I’d be quite interested in a piece that explains how to imitate another author’s style, using such an exercise as an example.

Rule of thumb: The Journal of Wordplay is here to provide studies and perspectives on wordplay that readers won’t often find anywhere else. If it looks like something you can find in lots of non-wordplay-specific venues, it might not make a good Journal submission.

But if you have something informed by a love of wordplay, then by all means, send it my way! We’ve got some great material for issue #5 already, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the world.